For Larkin, unresting death twitched at blackened curtains, and in Britain dying has often been the stuff of private nocturnal anxieties, as opposed to conversation lit by day. A major survey, which we report on this morning, explores attitudes around the full arc of the grim reaper's scythe. Despite signs of some mortal taboos losing their grip, when it comes to chewing over the practicalities of breathing our own last, most of us are as inhibited as ever.

Even business-like issues are often passed over in silence. More than a third of us say we have never asked any relative whether they have written a will. And the reticence is of another order entirely when it comes to more intimate expectations, concerning funeral arrangements, the final form of care we will want or where we would prefer to die. The six in 10 people who say they have never spoken to another soul about the last of these is striking, since this is one area where bottled up wishes reliably end up being wishes frustrated. Across the whole population, fully 70% tell strangers with clipboards they would rather die at home, and yet the official figures record that more than one death in every two ends up being in a hospital bed.

Some of this great gulf between what is wanted and what ends up happening, one might imagine, reflects a failure on the part of the healthy to think through where they will truly want to be when they are in an incomparably frailer condition. Perhaps. But the fear of leaving the world in an alien and medical environment runs deep – almost as many told the Dying Matters study that they fear a hospital death as said the same of dying alone or falling prey to violent crime. And indeed, more report a particular shudder at this particular prospect than the idea of the grave itself.

This government, like the last, agrees things ought to change. Whitehall strategies have aimed to make sure they do. The chance to die at home, after all, is one meaningful way to fulfil the politicians' well-worn rhetoric about patient choice. It could spare relatives the worry of back-and-forth travel to the ward at a fraught and typically miserable time. And here, for once, is a social problem whose principle solution is not money. A review before the summer will identify certain priority investments required in order to make dying at home more comfortable, but freeing health service beds from people who are never going to be serviced back into health would save resources in the end. No, the chief obstacle to dying better is nothing as worldly as cash. The real trick is finding the courage to face up to the inevitable, and then opening up as well. If we could only do that, then we could plan – before it is too late.